


She Meant the Sky

by 13letters



Category: Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)
Genre: Betrayal, F/M, Friendship, Guilt, Heartbreak, Loneliness, Pain, Redemption, Regret, Romance, Trust
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-19
Updated: 2017-12-19
Packaged: 2019-02-16 21:45:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13062771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/13letters/pseuds/13letters
Summary: The atmosphere has changed so it's light; the eye contact is eclectic. Just a glance, and it's like the ocean swallowing him whole, an island solitaire in a suit of vast, open empty with all the sky pouring.Perhaps this is different because there doesn't seem to be consequences. In this corridor (room, command center, island reservoir, hut,Falcon), not much exists but the moment, but each other.When his eyes drift from her eyes to lower, imperceptibly shift towards her lips like gravity, like the crystalline center of a star's orbit this one still point in the entire world of chaos,herlike she could ground him to where they sit a fraction apart.She calls him by his name.





	She Meant the Sky

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers, loves! Emotional Devastation ahead! This is a look into what the force bond between them might have included had -- quite simply -- they been allowed more time.

When the connection bridges the time and distance between them for the seventh time in only a handful of hours, she's -- she's just so tired.

Every second has been a battle, and every war is the same universal war of trepidation and _trying_.

Captain Poe Dameron is out there somewhere questioning authority and demanding the accountability of those prompted into power not because he's succumbing to helplessness, no; he's seen the holos of one of the Galaxy's youngest Queens who believed in the sanctity and the perseverance of a democracy that bid its people to criticize those in service to them because the people _choose_ who shall reign -- it's the people who bleed and suffer and cry.

Somewhere, Finn is living up the legacy of the effects of the Resistance upon his life. He fights with truth and for honor, for love and with humility and not for what prophets deign as good anymore (there've been too many casualties for either side to be proven as merely good -- say it again and remember: this is a war, and sometimes people _lose_ , oh, gods, help). He fights for what now is right. For the poetic justice, one rebellion falls, and another rises with contrition to prevail. One Jedi has failed, but there's always another, isn't there?

Rey can sense their lives like stardust, pinpricks of light in the vast darkness, but there's the feeling she can't quite shake either, one which has persisted for days but Master Skywalker never mentions. Thousands of souls are crying out in terror and in death, and Rey is so damned exhausted she might honestly cry.

"I was about to eat dinner," comes his voice hollowly. "Would you mind?"

"No," she tells him. "No, by all means, enjoy yourself."

"Hardly. I've been rationed simple foods. Bread, fruit, powdered supplements. A small roll, a pear, this beverage with little flavor and too much water, please," he insists harshly. He doesn't need the mask to harden his voice with bitterness and steeled resentment; it sets her on edge either way. "Am I monstrous for eating, as well?"

"You're more human for eating, as well," she counters. "It's an obvious show of weakness. And disrespect. What do your subordinates think if you're eating as poorly as they?"

"Mother always ate in the mess hall," he says before he can help it. Like the thought isn't actually his own, it's -- a fine line. This thread of fate.

It was a cheap attack. It was a thoughtless one, too, because the silence is worse than any exploitation, any swear, curse, or snarl of her defenses or his insecurities. These two disparate pieces, they're both tired of having to try to hold the Galaxy together like they're collectively the last chance it has, the only hope, the result of the aspirations of the people who have brought them there.

"Have you eaten yet?"

She finally allows herself to look at him, sharp and glaring. He's eating on his bed like the big-eared, goofily grinning apprentice Ben might have at the Academy once upon his innocence ago. Please, heavens, just give them back the last fifteen years. Couldn't they start again? "Yet?"

"Since the last we spoke?" he asks. He raises his gaze to her, and it burns. More aggressive than he intends, he snaps, "Your stomach wouldn't stop growling. It was becoming a nuisance."

She huffs, turns away. Mostly, she makes a show of exaggerating how annoying this is getting, eye rolling and all, but the sound of gushing water pulls her back: _life_ , quite simply, the promise of it, "No," she admits quietly. "I haven't."

"Rey."

"Excuse me," she bursts, but all too familiarly, Kylo Ren gestures as if to wage _what? Me?_

"I thought you were braver than this."

"I'm fine right now."

"Just walk in and tell him you're hungry," he mumbles around a mouthful of bread. "Trust me, it works, and stars know he's full of pent-up paternal instinct. Tell him to cook you something."

"I can't do that."

"Tell him you're so hungry that you'll die. Literally die."

"He'll say to go ahead. Only he'll direct me to the highest cliff to ensure I've offed myself quickly."

"Or he'll cut you in half in the middle of the night. Watch that old wizard."

"Please," she dismisses, glancing away for just a second. It's enough to miss that barest trace of pain he lets fade to nothing until he needs the rage. The blood on the snow. "Perhaps I'll just invite myself in with him," she winces, looking to what he'll assume is a door.

"Really?" he says. "That's a surprise. I wonder where you got that idea."

"Why did he quit inviting me to eat with him, though?"

"Because he's selfish."

"I don't think that's it."

"He's comforted by solitude. He's been protected by it. He won't offer you any help."

She shakes her head. "I'm convincing him."

"He decided he wanted to die old and comfortable. He can retire his legacy like a pension, so to hell with the rest of the Galaxy, right? Saving it once must be enough."

Gods, when she looks at him. What hurts more, the hope or the disappointment? "So you're admitting the Galaxy needs to be saved, Ben."

"We aren't that familiar."

"Luke will do what is right like he's always done. I've heard the stories."

And he's lived them. Solo, Skywalker, Organa, Amidala, Kenobi. He's lived their legacies and sees them, too; he sees his father's presence with the force like luck like irony like fucking regret so piercing it _aches_. Somewhere in the afterlife, his father straightens up from a sabacc table after tossing gold die; all of life is luck inherent. Lando always told him to know which cards to play.

It isn't the most subtle moment of his life when he mutters, "Would you like half of this pear?" really inconspicuously like it's nothing but an olive branch.

 _Help_ , she actually laughs. Only slightly, but he'll take anything he can get, the small flicker of light. The flame that sparks or lights or -- he forgets. But she is bright. And she knows what he's meant without having to pry into his thoughts. "I'm not brave enough to see if we can pass objects back and forth or try any other contact. Did the shot from my blaster injure you?"

"No," he lies dismissively. "Would you at least sit down? You're standing near the doorframe, and that's in poor taste."

She simpers, but in the end, perching on the windowsill somehow mirrors her almost sitting atop a trunk or some such in his quarters. It's mostly civil while it lasts. Watching him eat is primitive yet simultaneously calming since it's so normal. A reminder that humanity resides on both sides despite beliefs. This is all supposed to mean balance, after all; this is a concession or a bargain, a trade.

Her tired for his lonely. It's a common theme.

"Gods, Rey," he practically swears as he sets down his cup.

"I'm so sorry," she apologizes before she can think too much about it. She holds her hands over her growling stomach to silence it as it's deafening, enhanced by the metallic quiet and roaring silence, dear heavens. She can actually smell the bread.

"Rey. Just walk in and tell him you're hungry."

"Yes," she relents, practically whining. It's been difficult to readjust to hunger, though still, something within Ben wants to cautiously ask her how many days can she go hungry. And how long has she been? "Yes, I know, but I don't think he likes me."

"Can't imagine why. Go," he tells her. The eye contact is like a chasm. A pinnacle. It lasts too long, and it makes them far more vulnerable than they had been hours ago, because he hears himself try to comfort her with the words, "It's okay. Rey." This will be worth it all, in the end. They just have to hold on. Hold tight.

"I know," she whispers. And gods, God, this is the fall. "I hope I don't have to see you again."

"Sweetheart," he calls her -- only because she's gone, because no more than twenty minutes ago he watched her levitate rocks like a youngling, felt the ocean spray his face as rain misted down to encompass both of them, and she had been spinning in circles like a giddy schoolgirl, like that was some sort of pagan, heathen ritual to thank deities for the rainfall, like she was surprised so much water existed or that she could still experience such happiness. She _told_ him that. And carves up her secrets like her rib bones and offers them to him one by one like a brokered peace treaty.

He raises his hand, and the yellow pear lifts from his tray, glides through air and then through nothing. It disappears in the same spot she did, and so he starts counting.

 

Forty-eight minutes later, and he's happy to see she looks less pale and sunken in. He should be surprised to see her again so soon, but since she looks to have eaten, since she isn't really right here in the corridor standing next to confounded Hux.

"Don't you have somewhere else to be?" he asks the man, but in a way almost hurt (they don't know it yet that they're both pawns), Rey crosses her arms and sits right there on the immaculate white tile.

"As if I've a choice," she grumbles to herself, and he wishes he could see her surroundings.

He has to consciously keep his gaze off of her. When the alternative focus is Hux, however. Scowling and pedantic and sorry, too (once, they were just boys playing at war, and Poe used to be Ben's bestest friend until death, they swore), it's almost painful to _not_ see her and ignore what he's effortlessly and inadvertently been indirectly watching by ignoring for most of today. This gravitational pull.

"I think your influence would best be served back on the bridge. Retire when the fight is finished," Ben says to Hux who might pull his blaster right there.

"And what about your influence, my lord? Realized you've no talent for command, hmm?"

"I can't do this," he says impatiently, thinking inadequate. Thinking inferior. "Not with you. Not right now. Go away."

"Me?" she affronts, practically spitting fire, so up in arms it would be hilarious if it weren't so condescending.

"I beg your pardon --"

"General Hux," he grits. "Leave. Seal this corridor at once."

The stiff bastard actually smirks. "Shall I alert the maintenance staff that their service might be requested?"

"I could kill you," Ren swears openly. Without even blinking; at one point does this become a joke? "It would be effortless. Like cutting through air."

"I'm the quicker shot. And let's not forget I rank higher in terms of accuracy than you do with blasters."

"A margin of only six," Ben gripes.

"So these are the First Order's secrets," Rey boredly sighs.

"Hux."

"Let's remember I'm now in Snoke's favor, Ren."

"Sure. Lock the panels, please. Thank you," Ben calls after him like the prat he is. "You're very gracious. Both doors." As they slide closed, Hux glances through them scathingly. Fucking hell. "Prick."

"Monster," Rey bites back, rabid and -- and seemingly more content than the last they spoke. Her mouth doesn't quite lift in a smile, but it isn't quite anything else either.

"Yes," he says to her, "I'm what all parents warned their children about on sleepless nights."

"Even yours?" she asks softly, enjoying that mental picture just a little too much: the candlelit room, the ship models and building blocks strewn all over the floor. Han and Leia both laying in Ben's little kid bed with them, Ben in both their arms. She doesn't realize she's interchanging who he was for who he is same as he doesn't realizing he's hiding here.

"I didn't have anything to fear when I was a boy. They never let me know worry."

"Sounds better than most," she agrees, drawing back only slightly when he moves to sit opposite her.

"And still worse than some. Want to know something that will make you frown?"

The conflict in her eyes. Over such a simple question! It's ridiculous, she thinks; it's potentially devastating. And almost harmless because the inevitability, the familiarity, the intrinsic loneliness they get to meet with something kindred between them like quiet, tender understanding. "Sure," she murmurs. Really low. So imperceptibly soft.

"I didn't fear monsters either way. I wanted to look at a monster and demand the world answer why they've decided the being is a monster. Who gives them the right?" he genuinely believes, conviction like rising water spraying onto his face.

"The right to decide their own minds?"

"Based on judgment."

"Are you not judging them?"

He pulls a face. It's not at all unlike resentment or guilt. "I'm worthy of judging them."

" _What_? Decided who?"

"Myself."

"I'm not so backwater that I don't know what a dictatorship is," she accuses. She's still working out just how authoritarian the First Order is, but the distinction between right and wrong has always been an easy choice to make.

"Why's it matter if it works?"

"And if in the process, you absolve your followers of free will? Independent thinking?"

"For the greater good," he elaborated, only a little snarky. Practically teasing.

The atmosphere has changed so it's light; the eye contact is eclectic. Just a glance, and it's like the ocean swallowing him whole, an island solitaire in a suit of vast, open empty with all the sky pouring.

Perhaps this is different because there doesn't seem to be consequences. In this corridor (room, command center, island reservoir, hut, _Falcon_ ), not much exists but the moment, but each other.

When his eyes drift from her eyes to lower, imperceptibly shift towards her lips like gravity, like the crystalline center of a star's orbit this one still point in the entire world of chaos, _her_ like she could ground him to where they sit a fraction apart.

"I ate," she interrupts the silence quickly. And within an instant, they're strangers again. Almost. Whatever passes between them like a fleeting breath never lasts long, not until they meet again anyways, an entire Galaxy apart reduced to the distance between their hands.

"I'm glad," he says.

"Ben."


End file.
